


It's Over

by Nebulad



Series: Sea of Stars [25]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, Colonist origin, F/M, Healing, ME3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-16 05:22:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8088826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nebulad/pseuds/Nebulad
Summary: When Faust started speaking, he jumped. The memorial area was always quiet despite the din only a few feet away, and it’d be a cold day on Haestrom before Shepard ever used her indoor voice. “I kept expecting to find out that the attack on Mindoir was some sort of… probe by the Reapers. That somehow everything in my life would wind back to them. Eventually I had to get used to the fact that there was no reason for what happened.”





	

The chattering around the refugee docks always kind of melded into white noise for Garrus, but it was easier that way. There was more he could let go of if he didn’t hear the specifics of someone’s lost parents or siblings or children or… well, easier to let it wash off of him when he hit the showers. Made running the turian docks easier too, although he had no idea why they trusted him with it. He could do it, sure, but… it was a lot for someone who’d left Palaven for the Citadel, where Hierarchy wasn’t supposed to mean anything.

(If he was there though, he’d be the first to know if— _when_ Solana and dad arrived)

Faust volunteered to help him for a while— the turian civilians seemed to like her, against all odds. They usually hung around the scarily accurate VI of her, and true to its inspiration, the thing knew how to cheer up a crowd. Having the real Faust there might be even better, because then she could actually… do stuff, instead of going down to Purgatory to do shots by herself and wake up in the elevator.

“We’ll just be handling some creative sleeping arrangements,” he told her as he ushered her through the crowds. She was a tall human, but a short turian who let herself get lost in the flow of people— with his hand on her back, she’d get through faster.

“How much space do we have?” With all the free time she had _not_ being bustled along like a fish in a stream, she was slowing them down by gawking— well, not gawking. It wasn’t fair to make her sound like someone from the Presidium come to tour around the camps and take pictures with the sick.

“None, so we’re gunna be _really_ creative— Shepard?” She’d stopped dead, letting him get a bit too far ahead of her and redirecting traffic around her. Suddenly her fists were clenched at her side and she was staring forward and listening to… something. He didn’t know what she was hearing or what she had already heard, but by the look on her face… “Hey, it’s all right. Just keep walking.”

She looked up at him, her expression less readable than usual. Humans were already difficult— Faust could usually be ballparked as some variety of fury, but it wasn’t that. She uncurled her fists and… “Do you have someone here to coordinate efforts while your busy?” she asked.

“Of course.” Several people. Turians were good at hierarchy and he happened to be at the top of this one— even that was a dizzying height he hoped he never climbed above. “Is… is that boarding call?” he asked haltingly, because it seemed a little odd to swoop by the Citadel to stock up when they could do that on any, more conveniently located space station. Not that there were many left but it wasn’t _impossible._

“We’ll take the rest of the day but be out by nightfall. I… I have something I need to finish, but we’ll be back soon,” she said, then stood up straighter to kiss his mandible. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine— the way the system is built, I don’t need to be here,” he assured her. They were most definitely in everyone’s way, but he found he didn’t really care. No one was going anywhere important— there was nothing vital to be done besides stand around and try and think of ways to trick the Citadel officials into cutting your species a break. Hopefully you happened to find one that was from your homeworld, give yourself a leg up in negotiations.

“Yeah, but you _want_ to be here.” True, but he _needed_ to be with her. He’d left her on her ship twice— once she’d died, and the second time she’d been arrested for six months with no contact allowed. It probably wasn’t healthy, but he’d prefer to be there when all was said and done.

“It’s fine, Shepard. About time _you_ got to take care of some unfinished business.” Considering all the tragedy and trauma she’d taken care of for all of them.

. . . . .

The trip took a few days, out to Kite’s Nest— she wouldn’t talk about it, but they picked up some artifact from Khar’shan that Garrus neither saw nor heard any details about. It was Reaper space so it involved some tense maneuvering on Joker’s part, and one second where Garrus was almost _sure_ they weren’t going to make it— but they did, of course, because Joker was made for these kind of mid-war flight techniques and whatever muscle or gland humans had that handled fear reactions had long since withered in Faust. It was hard to be scared when she was just standing forward, _glaring_ out the cockpit like she’d make eye contact with a ship and send it scurrying back into deep space.

And then they were back on the Citadel. She stood in the memorial section of the refugee area, just staring forward at the wall. There were faces among faces among faces and it was another thing Garrus didn’t think he’d be able to just… forget later. There were endless names— some he couldn’t pronounce or couldn’t even read, some filtered through his translator, but they were all _there._ All those people and not even a fraction of the total.

When Faust started speaking, he jumped. The memorial area was always quiet despite the din only a few feet away, and it’d be a cold day on Haestrom before Shepard ever used her indoor voice. “I kept expecting to find out that the attack on Mindoir was some sort of… probe by the Reapers. That somehow everything in my life would wind back to them. Eventually I had to get used to the fact that there was no reason for what happened.” She was staring forward and Garrus felt himself get tense. She’d never personally talked to him about Mindoir— if the extranet was to be believed, she’d stopped talking about Mindoir altogether after an incident with a pushy reporter cost her thousands of credits in biotically smashed cameras.

“I haven’t heard much,” he said, more for her comfort. He’d looked into it, sure, but never… _into_ it. He found he didn’t want to see the faces of Faust’s dead family, didn’t want to know which parent she looked the most like or if there were more than just her and them. Uncles, aunts, cousins… it was her business.

“It was just batarians. Just people who… for _years_ afterwards I just— in Omega, you were there when the bartender poisoned me and I made him drink it?” she asked. He nodded. “The man who fired the rocket into your face, he was batarian. I… I _hated…”_

He… hadn’t known that about her. “You helped the guy with plague in Omega,” he pointed out.

“Because one sick guy doesn’t matter. And it wasn’t this constant, unshakeable hatred, I just… I resented that they hated me so much for being human when I had never done anything to them like they had done to me. It was this poisonous bitterness and hypocrisy and… I didn’t think about it for a while until I started thinking that maybe it was just the Reapers. Maybe it was indoctrination. Maybe I could just hate the stupid Reapers _more—_ but it wasn’t. It was just batarians.” She folded her arms over her chest, more like she was cold than angry. “I don’t… want to be back at square one.”

“What do you mean?” This was deep water— he wished they were alone. He could reach out for her now but he didn’t want to deal with a camera swarm in the middle of whatever was happening.

“I don’t want to go back to hating the entire batarian species for no reason. I… _can’t._ After everything that’s happened since, after they’ve been beaten and bloodied in their own systems, after what the Alliance has done to them— I can’t do it. I can’t hate them anymore, so I’m… letting go,” she said with a heavy shrug. “I wanted you there because I need someone to see me do it.”

He was trying to link what she said back to whatever they’d picked up in Kite’s Nest, but he didn’t know what it was or could be. Garrus didn’t know all that much about batarians, except that he’d worked with some that were as good as anyone was capable of being, and killed some that weren’t even worth wasting the bullets on. “Do what exactly?” he asked, hyper aware that he was hovering. She didn’t like him leaning his full height over her, but it was habit at this point to compulsively use himself as a meat shield.

She turned without answering, walking over to where the batarians were huddled against each other like escape pods floating out into the void of space. They looked tired, every single one of them with bags under every eye and their heads in their hands. He… sympathised. It was hard to sleep knowing that Palaven was gone— it would’ve been three thousand times harder if the turians were gone with it.

There was a priest repeating his sermon in a voice that trembled under the immense weight of loss. “Please don’t lose hope,” he begged in a rasping whisper, his voice petering off to nothing. Faust approached him directly, standing like she was bracing herself. She let him finish, but with every word she seemed to relax. It seemed less of a formal mass and more like one lost person trying to stand fast against despair— inspiring, if devastating. It was the sort of thing he’d been trying hard not to pay attention to, because once you took on too much heartbreak from too many people you started to fragment.

Faust was proof enough of that.

“I retrieved the Pillars of Strength from Kite’s Nest,” she said once she had the man’s attention, her hands jammed into the pockets of her hoodie. “They’re yours, waiting in Docking Bay D24. I’ve told them to expect you.” The priest was staring at her like she was speaking in tongues, but he’d heard every word. There was a tension battling with euphoria in his hands as they clenched and unclenched, and as he watched Commander Shepard from Mindoir in the Attican Traverse fidget in front of him.

“Thank-you, human,” he said in his sleep-deprived voice. Decorum straightened his back but exhaustion made his awe at the very thought of the pillars being saved more pronounced. “Right now, my people need any reminder of their faith that they can get.”

“I hope it helps,” she said, then took Garrus’ hand and pulled him away. They fell together on a bench in the empty entryway in complete silence, and she took a few more minutes to fidget uncomfortably before leaning against him. “You get it, don’t you?” she asked. “Their relay that the Alliance destroyed, Khar’shan… I couldn’t be happy about it. I didn’t want to be. Sixteen year old me would have been, but it’s different now and I needed to mark the difference. There had to be a point where I… just let go and stopped looking for _reasons_ for Mindoir. _It was because of Reapers, it was because of batarians,_ none of it matters anymore. It’s over.”

He ran his talons gently across her head, wondering at how they moved now automatically to fit together in a way that was comfortable despite… biology. “Does it feel like you wanted it to?” he asked. It was what was important— asking her if she was happy in the middle of the war she’d been trying to prevent for years was sort of redundant, but who could blame him for wanting her to be?

She smiled a little. “I was hoping Mindoir would just… disappear,” she admitted. “That I wouldn’t feel it like I was carrying it on my shoulders anymore. I guess I’m just lucky to be used to the weight by now.” He squeezed her as tight as he thought he was able without hurting her, and watched as she sat up to dig through the bag she carried with her. She pulled out a datapad and brought up a picture of a much younger her with two older humans. “Sara and Amal Shepard,” she told him, handing the device to him. He looked down at the picture, memorising the faces he’d been avoiding since the SR-1 when he’d realised she was _that_ Shepard, the one the humans talked about in the locker room. Mindoir Shepard. Alien Shepard, who’d never been to homeworld and lost her parents fighting off a slaver raid.

She looked like both of them, he decided.

**Author's Note:**

> tfw you notice a typo after you've already published a fic on tumblr and it's been reblogged. anyway I'm still tearing through bioshock and crying. [My writing blog is here](http://nebulaad.tumblr.com) and I promise I don't cry about Bioshock on there.


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